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At least the state kept its promise and returned the sign.

What happened after that can be blamed on that old excuse: what we have here is a failure to communicate.

At issue is the state highway historical marker comemorating Immanuel Lutheran College, an unusual institution that stood along East Market Street for 56 years. Founded in Concord in 1903, the school moved here in 1905. Until it closed in 1961,it was a high school, junior college and seminary run by white German Lutherans for black American students.

The campus, with a magnificent stone main building, stood on the north side of East Market Street, where Metropolitan United Methodist Church and the N.C. A&T State University tennis courts are now located.

After Lutheran closed, A&T absorbed a big chunk of the the campus. Most of the building were torn down.

The commerorative marker went up in the mid 1970s, with a dedication ceremony along East Market. The church lawn behind and to the sides made the marker stand out. People in cars could easily see it.

A few years ago, state and local governments began redesigning and beautifying East Market. The sign was taken down and stored. The state promised the small, but focul Immanuel Lutheran alumni group the marker would return as soon as the road work was done.

The state kept it's promise. But, darn it, they put the marker in the wrong place. It's implanted across the street in the next block to the west.

When Emanuel Lutheran alum Yolanda Leacraft heard of the marker's return, she went to take a look.

"I had a hard time finding it," she says. "I had to drive up and down the street three times."

Even though the sign remains near the campus site, Leacraft worries it blends in with the student apartments in the background. Also, nearby trees, once the cleaves return, will make the marker hard to see.

Leacraft plans to ask the state to uproot the sign and move it to the original site.

Mike Hill, who directs the state's historical marker program, says he'll call the highway maintenance people, in charge of putting up the signs, and ask that it be moved.

"It was put back up," he says, "without any communication from us."

Ruth Thompson, 85, has made it clear to her children and other family members: When she goes, the rock stays.

She's talking about the "upping rock," which she says stood a century and a half or so ago in front of a stage coach stop on High Point Road. Guilford Memroial Park, a cemetery founded in the 1930s by her father, William R. Futrelle, now occupies the site.

Thompson grew up in a now-vanished house in front of the cemetery facing High Point Road. The rock stood near by.

"My mother loved that rock," she says. "I have loved it. When I was growing up that is where my imaginary playmate lived. Her name was Mamie."

The term "upping rock" means people stepped on the stone to mount horses or to climb into the stage or a buggy.

Everywhere Thompson has moved, the rock has gone with her.

It now stands in beside her home in southwest Greensboro, although she rarely gets to see it anymore. She's a patient at the Wesley Long Nursing Center on Mackay Road, close to where where she first discovered the rock.

"I've told my children, it's not to go out of the family," she says.

The only other use of the rock she'd allow, she says, would be to return it to its original place at the cemetery "and make it a memorial to the horse and buggy years."

Academia can be bloody brutal.

Jim Lutzweiler, who teaches a history course at Guilford Technical Community College and is archivist at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, cites the example of Otto Schaden. Lutzweiler took a course in Egyptology under Schaden during the 1970s at the University of Minnesota.

The perservering Schaden refused to let various deans and tenure committees stop him. He has now made history by digging it up.

Schaden recently discovered the first tomb since 1922 in Egypt's Valley of the Kings. The tomb is near the 1922 discovery, King Tut's tomb, first entered by the legendary archaeologist Howard Carter.

Lutzweiler wonders if the University of Minnesota remembers Schaden?
He says the university refused Schaden tenure, in effect, firing him.

"Schaden was denied tenue ... for reasons I do not know," Lutzweiler says in an e-mail to the News & Record.

He says Schaden "was never able to hold down a permanent teaching job (though I felt he was one fine teacher.) He moved to Chicago, where he played polka music for some local ethnic band.

"He would save up his money and head for Egypt every time, ..." Lutzweiler says. "When he ran out, he would return to Chicago and play more polkas until he had enough to return to Egypt to keep chasing his dream. Now he'll probably never have to play another polka in his life!"

Lutzweiler says he recently chatted with another of Schaden's former students, still in Minnesota, and the man said, "The locals (or is it 'yokels?)... haven't even featured his Minnesota connection ... yet, probably having totally forgotten him."

Schaden's place is now apparently secure in academia, at the University of Memphis. The university is now reaping the rewards from the publicity generated by Schaden's discovery.

In recent decades, the building being demolished at Randleman Road and Interstate 85-40 was infamously known as the Southgate Inn. It attracted transients and police offices making arrests for drugs, prostituion, murder, shootings and beatings.

But in its prime during the 1950s and 1960s, the motel and a twin lodging place made local history on two fronts.

In about 1955, they became the city's first two Holiday Inns. The one on Randleman Road was called the Holiday Inn South. The other at 16th Street and U.S. 29 North was the Holiday Inn North.

They were built and operated by Greensboro developer John R. Taylor in the style of early Holiday Inns, a chain found in Memphis in 1952.

The buildings were one story and formed a U. They offered in room TVs, a swimming pool and restaurant. For years, respected civic organizations met at the two motels.

The two Holiday Inns also quietly made civil rights history in late 1960 or early 1961. Taylor integrated them. They were believed to be the first previously all-white lodging places to allow black people as guests.

Taylor, who owned the motels and large developing company bearing his name, was liberal in his beliefs for the time.

He and his family were determined to do their part to integrate Greensboro.

They made a major contribution because until then about the only places black visitors to Greensboro could stay overnight was a converted house, the Magnolia Inn on Gorrell Street, and a cinder block lodging place around the corner on Gorrell Street.

"I can't teach a Sunday School class and say one thing and then do another," Taylor said in a civil club speech in 1963, in which he justified his decision two and a half years earlier to integrate.

He told the group that integration had not hurt business. That went against an argument by businesses who refused to integrate. They feared white customers would stay away.

And the Holiday Inn South made political news in 1963, says Jack Betts, a Charlotte Observer writer and Greensboro native.

In an email, Betts cites James Spence's book, "The Making of a Governor," about the 1964 campaign, particularly the Democratic primary, between Greensboro's Richardson Preyer, Canton's Dan Moore and Wake Forest resident I. Beverly Lake.

Betts says the Spence book says a meeting was held Sept. 8, 1963, at the Holiday Inn South to introduce Preyer to about 50 Democratic leaders from the state. He said Greensboro's Hargrove (Skipper) Bowles, who would run unsuccessfully for governor in 1972, was there. Gov. Terry Sanford, who was ineligible to seek re-election, was there, too.

Preyer annouced for governor the next day. He lead the voting in the spring primary in 1964, but didn't get the necessary percentage of votes to escape a run-off. Runner-up Dan Moore called for a second primary. Lake endorsed Moore, who beat Preyer the second time. Moore went on to win the governorship that fall.

By the 1970s, the two Holiday Inns had become outdated. They were no match for the new high-rise Holiday Inn Four Season, which is now a Sheraton.

The two original Holiday Inns were eventually sold and became a series of independent motels, with the Southgate eventually taking over the former Holiday Inn South.

At the Southgate, police practiced "knock and talk." Without a warrant and suspecting illicit taking place, officers knocked on room doors to ask to look around. The practice was legal.

When the Southgate closed in 2004, the building became the La Cabana Hotel. The La Cabana sign sign remains, announcing it's "under new management." Three-fourths of the motel has been flattened, with one empty-wing remaining to be bulldozed.

The former Holiday Inn North, across from the now being revived Carolina Circle Mall, continues on as the Executive Inn and Suites.

For the second time since 1995, First Presbyterian Church has found someone to accept an expensive freebie.

Two residents of 201 West Bessemer Avenue, David Brossoit and George Weldon, will take for free a house at 620 N. Elm St., across from the church. In return, they'll move the 76-year-old, 3,000-square-foot house to one of the few remaining vacant lots, 204 W. Bessemer, in the historic Fisher Park neighborhood.

The men have the lot under contract to buy.

The church bought the North Elm house a few years ago with the intention of tearing it down for parking.

That idea enraged the neighborhood association, which urged the church to consider options: move the house; jack it up and park cars beneath it; leave it as is and shuttle church members from a city parking deck about three blocks away.

The neighborhood association's board met Monday night and unanimously approved Brossoit and Weldon's plan to move the house. Preservation Greensboro Inc. also has endorsed the move.

And the Greensboro Historic Properties Commission, which governs the city's three historic neighborhoods, gave its unanimous blessing Wednesday. It stimulated that the owners must provide a landscaping plan for the house at the new site and that they get permission of affected property owners before removing and replanting any street trees.

Brossoit, who appeared before the commission, said he didn't anticipate any problems getting the necessary permission from property owners. He said he hopes the move can be made soon, possibly as early as May.

"I'm excited,'' he said. "I see it as a once and a life time opportunity to save a contributing property in Fisher Park."

A "contributing property" is one of the houses and places that influenced the city's decision to make Fisher Park one of Greensboro's three local historic neighborhoods and the federal government to place Fisher Park on the National Register of Historic Places. The local historic designation came in the early 1980s with College Hill and Aycock neighborhoods also gaining historic district status at about the same time.

The disagreement over the North Elm house's future between neighborhood and church was a repeat of one in 1995 when the church wanted to demolish the even bigger McAlister House, located on the North Greene side of the church.

The house was once the home of Pilot Life Insurance Co. founder A.W. McAlister Sr. and his daughter, Dr. Jean McAlister, one of the city's first women physicians.

At the last minute, antique dealer Margaret Carlson, accepted the church's offer to take the house and move it. The cost of the move was paid in part by an anonymous donor.

The house now stands a tenth of a mile away to North Church Street. Carlson used it and an even older house next door for Carlson Antiques. She has since moved her business and an architectural firm occupies the houses.

With the latest move, the house will travel about two blocks north on North Elm, a block west on Fisher Park Circle, a block north on Carolina Street and about a half block west on West Bessemer.

Brossoit said he and Weldon plan to renovate the house for single-family use. He said it is uncertain whether they'll live in it or sell it. It will not become a rental property, he promised.

The move is expected to cost about $75,000 and will cause the tearing down of a maple tree on Fisher Park Circle, two magnolias on West Bessemer and four trees on the vacant lot.

The maple will be replaced and six magnolians at least 12 feet high and with a span of six feet will be added to West Bessemer to replace the two that will be lost. One of the two is diseased and close to death.

The magnolias along both sides of West Bessemer date to about 1918 and are considered an historic ingredient to a neighborhood that was started about 1900.

The house to be moved was built in about 1930, and lived in from then until the 1930s by the late Margaret Gay. In the early 1980s, the house was divided into offices for psychologists and counselors.

Suddenly, an old house in Fisher that has stood almost unnoticed for decades is attracting a flury of interest.

Located at 620 N. Elm St., across from First Presbyterian Church, the chuch bought the house 11 months ago. It offered it free to anyone who would move it. The church wants the space for parking.

Wednesday, to the relief of those Fisher Park residents who mourn the lose of any home in the historic neighborhood, a deal appeared to have been consummated. Fisher Park resident David Brossoit appeared before the Greensboro Historical Commission, which governs the Fisher Park Historic District, to ask approval to move the house.

Brossoit said he would pay to move the house several blocks to a vacant lot he and a partner, George Weldon, had contracted to buy at 204 W. Bessemer Ave., still inside the Fisher Park. Brossoit and Weldon would convert the house, used for offices during the past 25 years, back to a single-family dwelling.

The commission,after hearing guarantees that the trees displaced during the move would be replaced, granted approval. The decision was was conditioned on Brossoit meeting other city requirements for the move.

Thursday, after First Presbterian, learned of the commission's action, it sent an email to the News & Record that the house hadn't been given to Brossoit to move.

The church said a second party also was interested. The church didn't identify the party, but it turns out to be Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, a block south of First Presbyterian.

Robert Payne, a member of Holy Trinity's vestry, said the church might want to move the house to a lot on Smith Street, behind Holy Trinity. The house, he said, would help restore some of the lost residential look of Smith. The church would use the house for offices.

Payne stressed the vestry might not make a decision for several months. Ann Alexander of First Presbyterian Church said her church also wouldn't make a decision about the house for several more months.

City Planner Mike Cowhig, an advisor to the historic properties commission, said he and the commission members assumed that Brossoit had the church's permission to move the house. Otherwise, he wouldn't have been standing before the commission.

Brossoit said Friday he was not attempting to fool anyone. He was only trying to get a head start on the many municipal hoops he'll have to jump through if First Presbyterian gives him the house to move.

He said he contacted Mike Godwin, an attorney connected to the church, and told him he was going before the commission.

Godwin said he told Brossiot the church couldn't prevent him from going, but warned him he should make it clear that the church had not awarded him the house.

Cowhig and others who heard Brossoit's pitch to the commission said they don't recall him saying anything about First Presbyterian.

Thus, for the time being, the house will remain at 620 N. Elm. It has been there since 1930 when Margaret Gay moved in and lived there until the 1970s. Since then, the two-story, 3,000 square-foot dwelling has been occupied by accountants, counselors and psychologists.

Payne of Holy Trinity, a resident of Fisher Park who hates to see any old structure disappear, said with two parties interested in the house, a happy ending is assured.

"Whatever happens," he said, "the house will be saved."

Guilford County hasn't exhausted all directional naming opportunities for its schools, says reader Steve Williams of Rockingham County.

He was responding to school board chair Alan Duncan's assertion in a story Monday that the planned Northern Guilford High School means the county will have used up all points on the compass in naming rural schools.

Williams says Guilford could do like Pitt County and name a school South Central. Future growth of Pitt County could lead to a North Central High, West Central, East Central, Northwest Central, Northeast Central, Southwest Central and Southeast Central.

Williams says as best he can determine Northern Guilford will become the 33rd school in NORTH Carolina with the name north or northern in its name.

The others include Northampton County-East and Northamption County-West. And of course there's Northwest Guilford and Northeast Guilford.

Williams says confusion reigns when schools such as Western Guilford and Western Alamance clash in sports. When fans yell "Go Western," go figure which team they mean.

Williams points out Rockingham County avoided the rush to honor the compass. None of Rockingham's schools bear directional names.

That's not to say they lack direction.